Xiangyang Zhu

Xiangyang Zhu received the B.S. degree from the Department of Automatic Control Engineering, Nanjing Institute of Technology, Nanjing, China, in 1985, and the M.Phil. degree in instrumentation engineering and the Ph.D. degree in automatic control engineering from Southeast University, Nanjing, China, in 1989 and 1992, respectively. From 1993 to 1994, he was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow with the Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China. He joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Southeast University, as an Associate Professor, in 1995. Since 2002, he has been a Professor with the School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China, where he is currently the Director of Robotics Institute and the Director of the State Key Laboratory of Mechanical System and Vibration. He has authored 170 papers in peer-reviewed international journals and conference proceedings. His current research interests include robot manipulation planning, human–machine interfacing, and neural prosthesis. He is currently an Associate Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS on CYBERNETICS. He is also in the Editorial Board of the Journal of Bionic Engineering.

Distinctive EEG signals from the motor and somatosensory cortex are generated during mental tasks of motor imagery (MI) and somatosensory attentional orientation (SAO). In this study, we hypothesize that a combination of these two signal modalities provides improvements in BCI performance with respect to using the two methods separately, and generate novel types of multi-class BCI systems.

We propose a novel calibration strategy to facilitate the decoding of covert somatosensory attentional changes by exploring the oscillatory dynamics induced by actual tactile sensation. Offline analysis showed that the proposed calibration method led to higher accuracies than the traditional calibration method based only on somatosensory attentional orientation (SAO) data.